Wolf Willow, Page 20

  “I guess,” Jesse said mildly. “But I tell you, kid, don’t you go yellin’ so loud outside there no more. This is one of those winters when you might deefen somebody in 1907.”

  With his arm hanging in a sling made of a flour sack and a horse-blanket pin, and the loose sleeve of his sheepskin flapping, Rusty managed to go on riding. The weather was clear and bitter, full of signs that the boys said meant change—sundogs by day, Northern Lights by night. Even the noontime thermometer never climbed much above twenty. Flushing the stubborn cattle out of coulees and draws, they left behind them a good many cold-storage curses to startle the badgers and coyotes in the first thaw.

  Day by day they worked their herd a few miles closer to Horse Camp Coulee; night by night they took turns riding around and around them, beating their arms to keep warm, and after interminable star-struck icy hours stumbled into the sighs and snores and faint warmth of the tent and shook the shoulder of the victim and benefactor who would relieve them. Some days one or another couldn’t see to work, and when that happened they all suffered, for Jesse rode with the hands, instead of making camp, and in the icy evening they all had to fall to and shovel off a patch of prairie and set up the tent and fit the sooty lengths of stovepipe through the roof thimble, and anchor themselves to the earth with iron picket pins, the only thing they could drive into the frozen ground.

  After an hour or two the stove would soften up the ground close around it, but near the edges and under their beds it never thawed more than just enough to moisten the tarps and freeze the beds fast, so that they pulled them up in the morning with great ripping sounds. The tent walls that they banked with snow to keep out the wind had to be chopped free every morning, and wore their clots and sheets of ice from one day to the next.

  That cloth house stamped itself into Rusty’s mind and memory. It spoke so plainly of the frailty and impermanence of their intrusion. And yet that frailty, and the implication of danger behind it, was what most nettled and dared and challenged him. Difficult as this job was, it was still only a job, and one done in collaboration with seven others. It called only for endurance; it had very little of the quality of the heroic that he had imagined Saskatchewan enforced upon the men who took its dare. Sometime, somehow, after he had gone through this apprenticeship in the skills of survival, he would challenge the country alone—some journey, some feat, some action that would demand of him every ounce of what he knew he had to give. There would be a real testing, and a real proof, and the certainty ever afterward of what one was. The expectation had no shape in his mind, but he thought of it in the same way he might have thought of sailing a small boat singlehanded across the Atlantic, or making a one-man expedition to climb Everest. It would be something big and it would crack every muscle and nerve and he would have to stand up to it alone, as Henry Kelsey had, wandering two years alone among unheard-of tribes in country not even rumored, or as young Alexander Mackenzie did when he took off from Fort Chippewyan to open the mysterious Northwest and track down the river that carried his name. There were even times when he thought of the wolfer Schulz with near envy. Like him or not, he didn’t run in pack, he was of an older and tougher breed, he knew precisely what he was made of and what he could do, and he was the sort from whom one might learn something.

  Meantime he was the greenhorn, the outcast tenderfoot of the outfit, and he would remain so until he personally turned a stampeding herd, or rode seventy-five miles and back in twenty-four hours to bring a doctor for someone critically hurt, or plucked somebody from under the horns of a crazy longhorn steer. He nursed his sore shoulder, evidence of his so-far failure to perform heroically, like a grudge that must sometime be settled, or a humiliation that must be wiped out.

  The first night, when he had come out and confronted a sinking moon and a rising banner of Northern Lights, and the other one, after his fall, when he had been tempted into a yell of defiance, had several counterparts. Sometimes, riding around the dark mass of the herd, numbly aware of the click of hoofs, the sigh of a cow heaving to her feet, the flurry of movement from a scared or lost calf, the muted tramplings and mooings and lowings, it seemed he guarded all life inside his round, and heard its confusion and discomfort and dismay, and witnessed its unsleeping vigilance against the dangers that might come at it from outside the ritual circle his pony trod. The fact of living, more even than the fact of a job or a duty or the personal need to prove himself fit to call himself man in this country’s own terms, bound him to the cattle. The steam that hung above them was relative to the breath that plumed before his own face. It seemed to him a fact of tremendous significance that a cow never closed its eyes in sleep in all its life. These calves were on watch against the world from the time their mothers licked away the membrane from their wet faces until the axe fell between their eyes in Kansas City or Chicago. He felt that nothing living could afford not to be on guard, and that the warm blood of men and cattle was in league against the forces of cold and death. Like theirs, his mortality mooed and bellowed, keeping up its courage with its voice or complaining of its discomfort. He sang to the herd, or to himself, and sometimes played them tunes on the harmonica.

  They had to be content with a limited repertoire—the mouth organ had been his study for no more than ten days, on the boat coming over—so that he found himself running through a few songs many times. Sometimes, for variety, he rendered, talking aloud to himself, the pony, and the cattle, like a fool or a hermit, certain poems, especially one he had memorized in his first enthusiasm for Canada—a ballad of coureurs de bois and of a stranger that walked beside them and left no footprints in the snow. When he had succeeded in scaring himself with ghosts and shadows he might fall back upon a jigging Canuck tune,Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant,

  Rouli roulant ma boule.

  But everything he said or played or sang during his hours on the night herd was meant seriously, even soberly, even ritually, for he felt in every deceptive snow-shadow and every pulse of the Northern Lights and every movement of the night wind the presence of something ancient and terrible, to which the brief stir and warmth of life were totally alien, and which must be met head on.

  On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision and saw himself plain in a universe simple, callous, and magnificent. In every direction from their pallid soapbubble of shelter the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark—the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice.

  He was young and susceptible, but he was probably not far wrong in his feeling that there never was a lonelier land, and one in which men lived more uneasily on sufferance. And he thought he knew the answer to the challenge Saskatchewan tossed him: to be invincibly strong, indefinitely enduring, uncompromisingly self-reliant, to depend on no one, to contain within himself every strength and every skill. There were evenings when he sorted through the outfit, examining models, trying on for fit Ray Henry’s iron, Slip’s whalebone, Little Horn’s leather. Though he had ambitions beyond any of them, he admitted that there was not a man in the outfit who could not teach him something, unless it was Spurlock. And Spurlock, he perceived, was the one on whom he might have to prove himself. The others would tease him, Little Horn and Jesse would pull his leg, Panguingue would thump him in brainless good humor, but Spurlock would push his nasty little nagging persecution until he might have to be smashed. It even occurred to Rusty once or twice that that was exactly what Spurlock wanted: a test of strength. Well, so be it. Riding narrow-eyed, he compared their physical equipment. Spurlock probably had some weight on him, and Rusty had a picture in his mind of big hands, thick wrists. On the other hand, Spurlock must be at least thirty-five, and it was said that for five years he had dealt in a Butte gambling joint, an occupation to soften and weaken a man.
Let him come; he might not be half as tough as he sounded or acted; and in any case, let him come.

  And then, with singing stopped, and talking stopped, and harmonica stopped, riding slowly, thinking of challenges and anticipating crises and bracing himself against whatever might come, he might have word from his night companions of the prairie, and hear the yap-yap-yap and the shivering howl of coyotes, or the faint dark monotone of the wolves. Far more than the cattle or their protectors, they were the proper possessors of the wilderness, and their yelling was a sound more appropriate there than human curses or growls or songs, or the wheezy chords of the mouth organ, and certainly than the half-scared screech of defiance he had let off that one night. The wolves’ hunting noises were always far off, back north in the river bottoms. In the eerie clarity of the white nights they seemed to cry from inexpressible distances, faint and musical and clear, and he might have been tempted to think of them as something not earthly at all, as creatures immune to cold and hunger and pain, hunting only for the wolfish joy of running and perhaps not even visible to human eyes, if he had not one afternoon ridden through a coulee where they had bloodied half an acre with a calf.

  By day the labor and the cold and the stiffness of many hours in the saddle, the bawling of calves, the crackle and crunch of hoofs and wheels, the reluctant herded movement of two or three hundred cows and calves and six dozen horses, all of whom stopped at every patch of grass blown bare and had to be whacked into moving again. By night the patient circling ride around the herd, the exposure to stars and space and the eloquent speech of the wolves, and finally the crowded sleep.

  Nothing between them and the stars, nothing between them and the North Pole, nothing between them and the wolves, except a twelve by sixteen house of cloth so thin that every wind moved it and light showed through it and the shadows of men hulked angling along its slope, its roof so peppered with spark holes that lying in their beds they caught squinting glimpses of the stars. The silence gulped their little disturbances, their little tinklings and snorings and sighs and the muffled noises of discomfort and weariness. The earth and the sky gaped for them like opened jaws; they lay there like lozenges on a tongue, ready to be swallowed.

  In spite of his dream of a test hoped-for, met, and passed, the tenderfoot pitied himself, rather. The pain of his arm as he lay on the frozen ground kept him turning sleeplessly. Some nights his fingers throbbed as if he had smashed them with a maul, and his feet ached all night with chilblains. To be compelled to bear these discomforts and these crippling but unvaliant pains he considered privately an outrage.

  They told each other that it couldn’t last—and yet they half prayed it would, because cold as it was, it was working weather: they could collect and move their herd in it. Nevertheless the boys spoke of change, and said that this early in November, weather like this shouldn’t last more than a few days, and that the sundogs meant something for sure. Not at all fond of what they had, they feared what might replace it.

  At the end of the eighth day, with a herd of nearly four hundred cows and calves and two dozen bulls, they camped within ten miles of Horse Camp Coulee. The streaked sky of sunset hazed out in dusk. Before Jesse had supper hot the wind was whistling in the tent ropes and leaning on the roof in strange erratic patches, as if animals were jumping on the canvas. In an hour more they were outside trying to keep the tent from blowing away, half a dozen of them hauling the wagon by hand around on the windward side and anchoring the tent to it. The darkness was full of snow pebbles hard and stinging as shot, whether falling or only drifting they couldn’t tell, that beat their eyes shut and melted in their beards and froze again. While they were fighting with the tent, Slip came in from the cattle herd and talked with Ray. He did not go back; it would have been risking a man’s life to try to keep him riding. They did not discuss what was likely to happen to the cattle, though even Rusty could guess; they crawled into their beds to keep warm, let the fire go out to save fuel, gave at least modified thanks for the fact that they would not have to ride night herd, and because they could do nothing else, they slept.

  They slept most of the time for the next two days. When the wind eased off and they dug their way out, the wagon and the tent were surrounded by a horned dune of snow. Snow lay out across the plains in the gray, overcast afternoon, long rippled drifts like an ocean petrified in mid-swell, a dull, expressionless, unlit and unshadowed sea. There was not a sign of the herd; the only horses in sight were the four they had kept miserably tied to the wagon—Jesse’s Clydes and two night saddle ponies.

  Slip and Little Horn hunted up the horses, far downwind, before dark. They reported bunches of cattle scattered through all the coulees in that direction for a dozen miles. They also found that range steers had drifted in among them during the storm, which meant that all of that separation of whiteface and longhorn and steer and cow and calf had to be gone through again.

  The prospect appalled Rusty Cullen; he waited for them to say it couldn’t be done, that they would give it up and head for the ranch. It apparently never even occurred to Ray that they might quit. They simply chased and swore and floundered through the drifts, and wore out horses and changed to others, and worked till they couldn’t see, and fell into their beds after dark with about a hundred head reassembled. Next day they swung around in a big half circle to the south and east and brought together about a hundred and fifty more.

  Sweeping up a few strays as they went, they moved on the third day toward the corrals at Horse Camp Coulee and made half of the ten miles they had to cover. The hard part was about over. They spoke at supper of Molly Henry’s dried apple pies, disparaging Jesse’s beefsteak and beans. That night, sometime between midnight and dawn, the wind reached down out of the iron north and brought them a new blizzard.

  Into a night unfamiliarly black, whirling with snow, a chaos of dark and cold and the howl of a wind that sometimes all but lifted them from their feet, they struggled out stiff and clumsy with sleep, voiceless with outrage, and again anchored themselves to that unspeakable plain. While they fought and groped with ropes in their hands, ducking from the lash of wind and snow, apparitions appeared right among them, stumbled over a guy rope and almost tore the tent down, snorted and bolted blindly into the smother: range horses drifting before the storm. The cowboys cursed them and repaired their damage and got themselves as secure as they could and crawled back into their blankets, knowing sullenly what the drifting horses meant. When they dug out of this one they would have lost their herd again.

  Jesse had started the fire as soon as it seemed clear that the tent would not go down. When Rusty had got back into his bed next to Buck, with Panguingue’s feet jammed for a headboard against his skull, he could see the glow through the draft door and feel his stung face loosening in the warmth. The canvas roof bucked and strained, slacked off, stiffened in a blast. The wind came through in needles of cold. It was close to morning; he could make out the faint shapes inside the tent. He waited for Ray to say something—something to console them, perhaps, for their failure and their bad luck—but no one spoke at all. They lay appraising the turmoil half seen and half heard on the straining roof. Finally, after several minutes, Jesse said, “Anybody feel like a cup of coffee?”

  Only then did Ray speak. His hoarse, ironic whisper croaked across the tent, “Looks like you boys could have the day off. Sleep in, if you want.”

  “Sleep!” Ed Spurlock said. “How could anybody sleep when he thinks where them God damn cows are going?”

  “Just the same you better sleep,” Ray whispered. “You’ll need your rest, boy.”

  “You going to try rounding them up again?”

  Ray said, “We’re in this business to raise calves, not fertilize some prairie with their carcasses.”

  “Jesus!” Spurlock said. He rocked his head back and forth on his rolled mackinaw, glaring at the tent roof with eyes that shone oilily in the glimmer from the firebox. The wind took hold of the tent and shook it, testing every rope;
they waited till the blast let go again. “You can’t drive cows in this kind of weather, Ray,” Spurlock said.

  “I know it,” Ray whispered. “That’s why you get the day off.”

  “I bet you we end up by leaving the whole herd to scatter.”

  “We do, we’ll lose ever’ damn calf,” Ray said. His face turned and craned toward Spurlock, above and across from him. His indomitable croak said, “I don’t aim to lose any, if work’ll save ‘em.”

  “No, I can see,” Spurlock said. “You might lose a few of us though.”

  Ray laughed through his nose. “Why, Ed,” he said, “you sound like you thought you was more valuable than a calf.”

  “I’d kind of like some coffee, myself,” old Jesse said. “Don’t anybody else feel thataway?”

  “Shut upl” said Buck’s voice from under the blankets. He had a capacity for always sounding furious, even when he was talking through four layers of wool. “Shut up and let a guy get some sleep.”

  Panguingue produced a few exaggerated snores.

  There was a brief silence. The wind gripped the tent, fell away, pounced once more; they could hear it whining and ricocheting off the guy ropes. “Good God,” Ed Spurlock said restlessly, “listen to the God damn wind blow.”

  “I think I’ll just put the pot on anyhow, long as we got that fire,” Jesse’s soft voice said. Rusty heard the stiff creak of his bedroll tarp and the fumbling sounds as he got on his boots. There was a grunt, and Spurlock said savagely, “God damn it to hell, Jesse, watch out where you put your feetl”

  “Don’t leave your face hanging out, then,” Jesse said. “How can I see your face in this dark? I been huntin’ for ten minutes with both hands, and I just now found my ass.”

  “Step on me once more and you’ll find it in a sling,” Spurlock said. “Why can’t you stay in bed? There’s nothing to get up for.”